At some point, society needs to digest this 'sharing economy' and understand its pros/cons. On one hand, it provides a way to make money. On the other hand, the laborers are often putting themselves in situations where legally they should be covered with various forms of insurance as well as wage regulations (paying them as 'consultants' is the current method by which all of this is sidestepped).
Why The Sharing Economy Isn’t
31–40 of 42 posts
Re: Why The Sharing Economy Isn’t
#32So great piece with a lot of valid criticism but I also feels like it keeps judging the speech on a claim it doesn't continue to make. The author continues judging the speech as a claim to counter capitalism when in fact the speaker comes clean early on. This is unfortunate because it muddles the argument. The way I understand the argument its more that instead of companies making money on individuals its individuals…
> There is also quite a few laws that are actually hindering progress.
Definitely. I think this is one of those areas where the right way lies somewhere in the middle between the two extreme positions. Yes there are a lot of shit laws - but there are also a lot of great laws enacted for citizen protection and we should be careful this joyful wave of "disruption" does not throw the baby out with the bath water.
Re: Why The Sharing Economy Isn’t
#33Maybe it's because I work for a nonprofit, but this piece seems like speculation and paranoia. Oh, so this group Peers is actually funded by a handful of wealthy patrons? Guess what--all nonprofits make 90%+ of their revenues from the top 10% or less of donors. Some nonprofits only really have ONE donor. That's just how the nonprofit sector works. All of it. By the author's logic, the Red Cross is astroturf. I think…
The words "astroturf" and "grassroots" refer to political movements. Wealthy people create the appearance of a broad movement representing the public interest that advocates for certain policy positions, but this is just to disguise the primary mission of the organization, which is to expand the wealth of the donors. If wealthy donors used the Red Cross to lobby governments for favorable legislation, then your analogy would be reasonable.
And the nearest thing to a mission statement of peers.org is "We educate our peers and community leaders about the benefits of sharing. Together, we can help protect and grow the sharing economy."
"Educating our peers" sounds a lot like customer acquisition efforts for the relevant startups. "Protecting the sharing economy" probably refers to the startups' regulatory issues.
Re: Why The Sharing Economy Isn’t
#34Is this not a shameless land grab for the term "sharing economy"? I've always associated the term with actual grassroots things like Freecycle, LETS systems etc. Or maybe people have actually started to think AirBnB is part of the "sharing economy" and I just missed it.
I would guess they are going for an IPO soon and tries to attach themselves to something sufficiently vague that seems bigger than themselves.
Re: Why The Sharing Economy Isn’t
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry if I was being unclear. I wasn't trying to say craigslist does a disservice to the economy in general; it's clearly beneficial and I don't want to diminish that. Rather, I think that its attitude of being barebones and avoiding profit is doing a disservice, by holding it back from becoming a better, more useful service.
If that was the case , one would expect a for profit craigslist to have dominated by now.
Small nitpick, but to be clear: Craigslist is a for-profit company, and has been registered as such since 1999. The job listings cost money to post. That's where the site is believed to make most of its revenue.
The .org domain, and the fact that a lot of users haven't experienced posting a job, create the popular misperception that CL is a nonprofit. To be fair, it's a strange kind of company, and I'm not sure if profit is its overriding goal, per se. But it's a for-profit enterprise. It may be the most laid-back for-profit I've ever seen, though. :)
Re: Why The Sharing Economy Isn’t
#36Maybe it's because I work for a nonprofit, but this piece seems like speculation and paranoia. Oh, so this group Peers is actually funded by a handful of wealthy patrons? Guess what--all nonprofits make 90%+ of their revenues from the top 10% or less of donors. Some nonprofits only really have ONE donor. That's just how the nonprofit sector works. All of it. By the author's logic, the Red Cross is astroturf. I think…
I think you're coming at this from the wrong direction.
Peers is a lobbying organization for SV companies that are trying to enter long regulated industries with a business model that does not work when regulated.
They attempted the "This market needs disruption! We're cool and big government regulation is lame!" message at the beginning, and it was working alright. Then there is backlash after some AirBNB users trashed and robbed a house and an Uber driver in DC was arrested for sexual assault (charges dropped), etc. People are being reminded of why the regulation is there in the first place and that's not going to get those regulations relaxed in the american party politics system.
Peers is an alternate strategy emphasizing a positive (sharing is great!) instead of a negative (regulation is bad!) and they appropriated the language and vocabulary of the existing culture/movement/whatever-you-want-to-call-it because it's great language and already tested as having a positive emotional impact on people. The American right gets the anti-regulation angle and the American left gets the "sharing culture" angle now.
This guy is taking that appropriation personally, since some of these businesses are not at all compatible with the core tenants of the sub culture he belongs to. I can't blame him for that, he's absolutely right about that part. They are appropriating the language of a movement they are fundamentally at odds with for marketing/political purposes.
> I can say with certainty that this article is heavily biased, ignorant of how most nonprofits work, and ignorant of the public policy process
It's a personal blog post so of course it's biased, it doesn't pretend not to be, and there are no nonprofit groups involved (although there are a few non-profit groups that have partnered with peers) so throwing around the word "ignorant" when you have got your basic facts backwards is unwarranted.
Re: Why The Sharing Economy Isn’t
#37Maybe it's because I work for a nonprofit, but this piece seems like speculation and paranoia. Oh, so this group Peers is actually funded by a handful of wealthy patrons? Guess what--all nonprofits make 90%+ of their revenues from the top 10% or less of donors. Some nonprofits only really have ONE donor. That's just how the nonprofit sector works. All of it. By the author's logic, the Red Cross is astroturf. I think…
> By the author's logic, the Red Cross is astroturf. It would be like that if the Red Cross claimed to be a grassroots organisation and engaged in advocacy for its funders. As far as I know neither of those things are the case, and if they are I hope somebody will write critical blog posts about it.
If you speak to people who were involved in Occupy Sandy -- a real grass-roots effort to relieve the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy -- they can tell you what dealing with the Red Cross is really like. [typo edit]
Re: Why The Sharing Economy Isn’t
#38I remember when the web and later peer2peer was just taking off: "this is the death of the middleman". And here we are, as the "masses" joined in the fun, we're surrounded by not just middle-men but huge middleman-concerns, walled gardens, "siren servers". Turns out AoL and Yahoo had it about right, they were just 15 years too early and a tad too innocuous ;D (Only tangentially related but remember why Skype took off…
With most of the architectural decisions of skype known... why wouldn't anyone create an alternative?
Re: Why The Sharing Economy Isn’t
#39All platforms can be thought of as positioning themselves for rent seeking - that is app stores, linkedin, and yeah airbnb. Things that require a network effect, after they get it, are in a super leveraged position that they can cash in. That said, the platforms that choose not to cash in on this tend to not be as successful. Couchsurfing wasn't. Cash and the promise of cash for investors allows a company to spend a…
"Live by disruption, die by disruption." - Bruce Sterling
Re: Why The Sharing Economy Isn’t
#40All platforms can be thought of as positioning themselves for rent seeking - that is app stores, linkedin, and yeah airbnb. Things that require a network effect, after they get it, are in a super leveraged position that they can cash in. That said, the platforms that choose not to cash in on this tend to not be as successful. Couchsurfing wasn't. Cash and the promise of cash for investors allows a company to spend a…
> That said, the platforms that choose not to cash in on this tend to not be as successful. Couchsurfing wasn't. By what metric? The people I know who use couchsurfing.org seem very enthusiastic about it, which is obviously anecdotal but it's odd to be reading that it's a failure.
Probably total number of people sleeping at Couchsurfer vs AirBNB places per night. In this sense, AirBNB is introducing more people to the concept.
I have used both, and AirBNB is much easier in cities, where Couchsurfing hosts probably get way too many requests.